OCZ is all-but-ready for next week’s CeBit conference in Hannover, Germany. Amongst other things, OCZ is expected to formally launch the much-anticipated Vector SSD in PCIe form, completely bypassing the SATA 3.0 interface bottleneck. As we found out in our own review, the Vector is currently the best overall performing SSD on the market, so it is a safe bet it will see some performance improvements in a PCIe form-factor. However, given OCZ’s penchant for designing and building PCIe-based SSDs and sticking anywhere from 2-4 controllers onto a single PCIe card, the sky is literally the performance limit.

What OCZ’s ZD-XL SQL Accelerator is expected to look like

Also expected to debut is another custom SSD solution tailor-made for the enterprise market. OCZ is planning to announce the “ZD-XL Accelerator”, designed specifically for SQL Server database applications. SQL databases are one application where the high IOPS power of SSDs can actually be maxed out, necessitating either additional hardware or other measures to be taken.

OCZ believes it has the solution, by designing an additional software layer to work with the incoming data and the drive itself to manage which DBA’s remain in the faster disk cache in order to minimize the amount of time the database must spend waiting on flash-level reads. For a normal desktop, this doesn’t seem like much, but given large SQL databases can span entire server racks of disks, the problem of proper cache management becomes a very real one.

If you or your company knows all about managing large enterprise SQL databases then you may be interested to know OCZ will be inviting some enterprise customers to become beta testers for its ZD-XL Accelerator solution. Not a bad gig if you can get it!